anity (or
thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to
God. A need as strong as physical hunger.

Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I
prayed to be pure ... like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who
wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden,--and yet achieved
great quests and were manly in their deeds....

* * * * *

The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals
in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed
about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.

I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book
of star-maps I possessed.

I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other
worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite
imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!

Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with
strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading
books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's _Other Worlds_ ... Camille
Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and
novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....

During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and
prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His
shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching
blackness of night:

"O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for
humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will
love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed--till one
day, having kept myself wholly for _her_ as she has kept herself for
me,--give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will
be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and
alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by
watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."

Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in
sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the
core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not
understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.

* * * * *

The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with
the rest of t